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“Alien” Personnel in the Soviet State: The People’s Commissariat of Agriculture under Proletarian Dictatorship, 1918-1929

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

James W. Heinzen
James W. Heinzen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Yale University
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Extract

Land policy must be carried out by an apparatus that has not grasped the tasks and ideas of Soviet construction in the countryside and that is riddled with elements that are alien and even hostile to Soviet power.

—N. M. Shvernik, section chief, People’s Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1924

“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.

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Information
Slavic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 73 - 100
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1997

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References

I would like to thank Rebecca Griffin, Michael Hickey, Peter Holquist, David Kerans, Stephen Kotkin, Moshe Lewin, Daniel Peris, the two anonymous readers for Slavic Review, and the members of the Delaware Valley Seminar on Russian History, especially the coordinator, Robert Weinberg, for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The International Research and Exchanges Board, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Study, and the Princeton University Committee for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences also provided funds to support this project. The epigraph is taken from Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 11. 8-13 (Rabkrin report on investigation of Narkomzem staff).

1 Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Gilbert, Stuart(New York, 1955), 61–63.Google Scholar

2 The terms land administrationand agricultural administrationare used interchangeably in this article to refer to the Commissariat of Agriculture’s network of central and local agencies.

3 See Orlovsky, Daniel, “Gimpel’son and the Hegemony of the Working Class,“ Slavic Review 48, no. 1(Spring 1989): 104–6;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Orlovsky’s, articles, “The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s,” in Siegelbaum, Lewis H.and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity(Ithaca, 1994), 220–52;Google Scholarand “State Building in the Civil War Era: The Role of the Lower Middle Strata,” in Koenker, Diane P. et al., eds., Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War(Bloomington, 1989), 180–209.Google ScholarSee also Rowney’s, Don Karlstudy of the formation of what he calls the “technocracy” in the late imperial and early Soviet periods, Transition to Technocracy: The Origins of the Soviet Administrative State(Ithaca, 1989).Google Scholar

4 Orlovsky, “Hidden Class,” 244.

5 Sternheimer, Stephen, “Administration for Development: The Emerging Bureaucratic Elite, 1920-1930,” in Rowney, Don Karland Pintner, Walter M., eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century(Chapel Hill, 1980), 317–54.Google ScholarIn this article, Sternheimer posed a still largely unanswered question that this article will address in part: “Who were the Soviet servitors of the 1920s? remains an important (and altogether neglected) area for empirical investigation” (319).

6 Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History oflnterwar Russia(New York, 1985);Google Scholar Pethybridge, Roger, The Social Prelude to Stalinism(New York, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Siegelbaum, Lewis H., Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929(Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 3–5, 113-17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSiegelbaum also correctly asserts that “it would not do, however, to treat relations between the state and the intelligentsia in simple bipolar terms. The boundaries between the two were too fluid and divisions within each too severe to sustain such a framework” (115).

8 On the changing social composition in the Russian bureaucracy and its impact on ministerial politics of the autocracy, see especially Rieber, Alfred J., “The Sedimentary Society,” in Clowes, Edith W., Kassow, Samuel D., and West, James L., eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identities in Late Imperial Russia(Princeton, 1991);Google Scholarsee also the articles in the Pintner and Rowney collection, Russian Officialdom;and Orlovsky, Daniel T., The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881(Cambridge, Mass., 1981);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wortman, Richard, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness(Chicago, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 For a pioneering treatment of Bolshevik institutional and political culture, see Mark von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930(Ithaca, 1990). See also, for example, Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ordzhonikidze’s Takeover of Vesenkha: A Case Study in Soviet Bureaucratic Politics,“ Soviet Studies 37, no. 2(April 1985): 165–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Historians since E. H. Carr have noted the weakness of the Soviet state in the countryside. See, for example, his Socialism in One Country, 1924-1926, 2 vols. (New York, 1958-1960), 2:311-18.

11 Starr, S. Frederick, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870(Princeton, 1972).Google ScholarBen Eklof has recently directed our attention to the fact that “underinstitutionalization” is a common thread linking the late tsarist and early Soviet periods. See Eklof, , “The Inconsistency of NEP,” in Taranovski, Theodore, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History: Progress or Cycle?(Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 314.Google Scholar

12 Zaionchkovskii, P. A., Pravitel’stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow, 1978);Google Scholar Zaionchkovskii, , Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia: Politicheskaia reaktsiia 80-kh-nachala 90-kh godov(Moscow, 1970);Google Scholar Robbins, Richard, Famine in Russia, 1891-92: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis(New York, 1975);Google Scholar Yaney, George, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930(Urbana, 1982);Google Scholar Frieden, Nancy M., “The Politics of Zemstvo Medicine,” in Emmons, Terenceand Vucinich, Wayne S., eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government(Cambridge, Eng., 1982).Google Scholar

13 On the underfunding of local governments compared with western Europe, see Hamm, Michael F., “The Breakdown of Urban Modernization: A Prelude to the Revolutions of 1917,” in Hamm, , ed., The City in Russian History(Lexington, Kent., 1976), 182–200.Google Scholar

14 On the third element, see Emmons and Vucinich eds., Zemstvo in Russia, especially the articles by Kermit E. McKenzie, “Zemstvo Organization and Role within the Administrative Structure“; Thomas Fallows, “The Zemstvo and the Bureaucracy, 1890-1904“; Robert E.Johnson, “Liberal Professionals and Professional Liberals: The Zemstvo Statisticians and Their Work“; Frieden, “Politics of Zemstvo Medicine“; and Terence Emmons, “The Zemstvo in Historical Perspective.” Both a discussion of the functioning of these central and local agencies themselves and a full elucidation of how the Commissariat of Agriculture formulated land policy lie outside the parameters of this article. My work has investigated these issues in other places. See James W. Heinzen, “Politics, Administration and Specialization in the Russian People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, 1917-1927” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993).

15 Tocqueville, Old Regime, 68.

16 Reported in Narkomzem’s internal weekly, Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1926, no. 10:2-3.

17 Three major published sources are central to any social analysis of the Soviet state in the 1920s. The first is a 1922 survey of government employees, the results of which have been compiled by Vasiaev, V. I., Drobizhev, V. Z. et al., Dannye perepisi sluzhashchikh 1922 goda o sostave kadrov Narkomatov RSFSR(Moscow, 1972).Google ScholarThe second and third are the Central Statistical Administration (TsSU) and Gosplan surveys of the state and cooperative apparatuses: Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 1924-1928 gg. (Moscow, 1929); and Bineman, Ia. M.and Kheinman, S., Kadry gosudarstvennogo i kooperativnogo apparata SSSR(Moscow, 1930).Google Scholar

18 Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 28. Vesenkha and the Central Statistical Administration also had the status of commissariats; each was about a quarter the size of Narkomzem. The finance commissariat was slightly smaller than Narkomzem, having suffered severe cutbacks after 1926.

19 Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, table 3, p. 12.

20 See Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 16, for an accounting of the staffs of each commissariat in these years.

21 When determining a person’s social class preparatory to giving that individual a position in the apparat, the communists were generally most concerned with one’s proiskhozhdenie, or social origin, which meant parents’ background as of 1917. Sometimes statisticians also used the category “social situation” (polozhenie), which defined a person’s social position or occupation in 1917, or, if a party member, when one joined the party. In any case, the imprecision of these categories cautions one to take these figures as approximations, rather than as precise numbers.

22 Lewin, Moshein Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization(New York, 1968)Google Scholarand his essay “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” in Making of the Soviet System, and Shanin, Teodor, The Awkward Class. Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia, 1910-1925(Oxford, 1972).Google ScholarNarkomzem’s party leadership and nonparty specialists avoided employing the kulak-seredniak-bedniak categories that many party leaders used in discussing the countryside. The commissariat’s policy of focusing its educational and modernization efforts on the most progressive stratum of the village population acted as a disincentive to stigmatizing the better-off peasantry. In statistical compilations of local cadres, they often simply used the category “peasant.“ Before 1927, Narkomzem downplayed the differentiation in the village that so obsessed many party observers watching for evidence of class struggle in the countryside. Like rightists in the party, they rarely used the derogatory and explosive term kulak.

23 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” Journal of Modern History 65(December 1993): 745–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarIt is not within the scope of the articles of Lewin, Shanin, and Fitzpatrick, however, to show how this occurred in practice, nor do they outline tactical struggles within and among institutions over these categories. On the “declassing” phenomenon, see also Lewin, “Leninism and Bolshevism,” in Making of the Soviet System.

24 Statisticians generally considered landless rural laborers (batraki)to be proletarians.

25 Nosova, N. P., “Formirovanie kadrov spetsialistov sel’skogo khoziaistva v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne (1917-29),” in Tolmacheva, R. P., ed., Naselenie i trudovye resursy Ural’skoi sovetskoi derevni(Sverdlovsk, 1987), 6.Google Scholar

26 RSFSR, zemledeliia, Narodnyi komissariat, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (IX Vserossiiskomu s“ezdu sovetov) za 1921 g. (Moscow, 1922), 28.Google Scholar

27 RSFSR, zemledeliia, Narodnyi komissariat, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (XII Vserossiiskomu s“ezdu sovetov) za 1923-24 gg. (Moscow, 1925), 166.Google ScholarIn 1927, there were only 18,500 agronomists in the entire USSR.

28 In 1928, the USSR’s thirty agricultural vuzy (higher educational institutions) and five agricultural departments in universities could satisfy only 28 percent of Narkomzem’s demand for graduates. K XVI s'ezdu VKP(b)(Moscow 1930), 130. See also Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1927, no. 19:10.

29 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 19, 11. 1-9 (Narkomzem Collegium protocols); RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534.

30 For an overview of the phenomenon of bourgeois specialists in the state apparatus, “indispensable for the success of the regime,” see Lewin, “Society, State and Ideology during the First Five Year Plan,” and Lewin, “Leninism and Bolshevism,“ in Making of the Soviet System. See also Carr, E. H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923(New York, 1952), 2:182–87;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Socialism in One Country, 1:115-22, 379-81; and Carr, and Davies, R. W., Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, 2 vols. (London, 1969–1971), 1:574–604.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSiegelbaum, Soviet State and Society, 54-61; Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939,” in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia(Ithaca, 1992), 149–70;Google Scholar Peris, Daniel, “Commissars in Red Cassocks: Former Priests in the League of the Militant Godless,” Slavic Review 54, no. 2(Summer 1995): 340–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFor interesting conclusions based on a quantitative and structural analysis of several people’s commissariats, see Rowney, Transition to Technocracy.

31 As late as 1924, 35 percent of the 66 people who comprised the top leadership group of Narkomzem were “from the gentry” (iz dvorian). Of these, 7 had been landowners (pomeshchiki). RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 2ob.

32 The Orgotdel (the Organization and Instruction Department) and Uchraspred (Records and Assignment Department) merged in 1924 into Orgraspred, a very powerful department of the secretariat responsible for the direction of subordinate party organs and the allocation of personnel. See Bol’shevik, no. 8 (30 April 1928): 66-71. On Orgraspred, see Carr, Socialism in One Country, 2:203-5, and Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 2:123-26.

33 For details on long-running tensions between Rabkrin inspectors and Narkomzem’s party leadership over the question of the social origins and political reliability of Narkomzem’s personnel, see Heinzen, “Politics,” chap. 5.

34 Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24.

35 Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1928, no. 4:10.

36 For a biographical sketch on the occasion of Teitel'’s thirtieth year in land work, see Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1928, no. 46:11. In 1930, Teitel’ was arrested as part of the so-called Laboring Peasant Party, together with A. V. Chaianov, N. D. Kondrat'ev, and other leading agricultural specialists.

37 In 1929, 24 percent of higher and mid-level officials at the okruglevel and 27 percent at the oblast’ level were holdovers. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 28.

38 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 7.

39 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 6ob.

40 By 1921, the communist contingent was just 3 percent, approximately the same figure as in 1918. Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (RTsKhlDNI), f. 17, op. 65, d. 175, 1. 48 (Correspondence between the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Communist Party fraction). One party in spector complained that when the commissariat was reorganized in 1923 into five large divisions, each of which oversaw ten or more subsections that concentrated on technical issues, most subsections were completely devoid of communists. Rigby, T. H., Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967(Princeton, 1968), 420.Google ScholarOn 1928-29, see Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24.

41 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1810, 11. 75-76 (Correspondence between Narkomzem and Central Committee, 1925).

42 This figure actually masks a small decline in communist representation between January 1924 and January 1927. Piatnadtsatyi s“ezd VKP(b), dekabr’ 1927 goda, stenograficheskii otchet(Moscow, 1961), 1:446-47.

43 Piatnadtsatyi s“ezd, 446-47. The commissariat with the highest proportion of communists, Narkomtrud, had 28 percent. Narkomtorg was close behind with 27.6 percent. At the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929, it was reported that 11.7 percent of all employees were communists. This figure jumped to 25 percent for those in administration. Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b), aprel’ 1929 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet(Moscow, 1962), 458-59.

44 See Jasny, Naum, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to Be Remembered(Cambridge, Eng., 1972).Google Scholar

45 See Yaney, Urge to Mobilize, on the Ministry of Agriculture under Stolypin and the Provisional Government.

46 One can compare Narkomzem, where the experts were frequently former SRs, with Vesenkha and Narkomfin, where former Mensheviks dominated. See Valentinov, N. V., Nasledniki Lenina(Moscow, 1991), 132–38.Google Scholar

47 Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 374, op. 27, d. 702, for Rabkrin’s efforts to reorganize Narkomzem in 1927-28 (Rabkrin investigation of Narkomzem party cell, 1925-27).

48 On the arrest of Zemplan specialists, see, for example, RGAE, f. 478, op. 2, d. 168, 1. 55, 116 (Zemplan materials).

49 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 370,11. 12-13 (Politburo protocols, 9 August 1923). The famous agricultural specialists N. P. Makarov and A. N. Chelintsev were persuaded to return in 1925. For the controversy that erupted around their return, see Heinzen, “Politics,” chap. 5.

50 For a characterization by an unknown Narkomzem superior (probably I. A. Teodorovich) of N. D. Kondrat'ev as “formerly an active and political worker of SR inclination who has moved away from this inclination and is politically completely reliable” that is located in the files of the commissariat’s personnel department, see RGAE, f. 478, op. 12, d. 957,1. 34 (Characteristics of personnel, 1922-23). In the same report, N. P. Oganovskii is characterized as politically completely loyal, but as having earlier possessed a “purely narodnikideology.” On the “crimes” of Kondrat'ev, A. V. Chaianov, and others arrested in the so-called Laboring Peasant Party affair, see Kondrat'evshchina, Chaianovshchina i Sukhanovshchina: Vreditel’stvo v sel’skom khoziaistve(Moscow, 1930); and Kondrat'evshchina: Bor'ba za kadry(Moscow, 1931).

51 The definition and usage of the category “worker” for “peasant” in the 1920s is, of course, problematic. Although there is not space to treat this issue in detail here, I wish to emphasize the regime’s persistent concern that “workers,” and especially “workers from the bench,” be employed throughout the state apparatus. For more, see, for example, Hoffmann, David L., Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941(Ithaca, 1994),Google Scholarand Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1:89-94.

52 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 4.

53 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18, 1. 9 (1930 report on agricultural cadres by allocation department of the Central Committee).

54 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 230,1. 52 (On assigning communist-students who have graduated from Timiriazev Academy, 1926).

55 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087, 1. 17 (Report of People’s Commissar Kubiak). N. P. Nosova’s assertion that “proletarians” and “peasants” played an important role in building the commissariat in the 1920s is clearly an exaggeration, informed by official histories of the state and Communist Party. Nosova, “Formirovanie,” 8. See E. G. Gimpel’son, Rabochii klass v upravlenii Sovetskim gosudarstvom: Noiabr’ 1917-1920 gg. (Moscow, 1982) for assertions similar to Nosova’s that plagued the work of Soviet historians on revolutionary state building. See also Orlovsky’s comments in “Gimpel’son and the Hegemony of the Working Class.“

56 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18. In October 1929, 11.9 percent of all employees in the people’s commissariats were former workers and 4.5 percent were children of workers. That proportion rose somewhat at the highest levels of the hierarchy.

57 A Central Committee circular clearly sent to calm local party leaders eager to purge old specialists urged them not to fire holdovers before new cadres could be trained. “The cohort of red specialists and administrators is inconsiderable at present. Their preparation is a matter that will take a long time. Only by preparing our own specialists from among workers and peasants can we replace the alien elements in the state apparatus.” RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 469, pt. 22 and d. 480, pt. 26 (Politburo protocols and supplement, 1924).

58 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 84, d. 252, 1. 4 (Central Committee materials on Narkomzem).

59 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 69, d. 171 (Central Committee statistics on cadres). This file contains a complaint that the commissariat’s report on cadres does not provide a plan for increasing its peasant contingent despite the low number of peasants in comparison with other commissariats. On Lenin, see Leninskii sbornik(Moscow, 1959), 36:163 and 35:228.

60 Pethybridge, Social Prelude to Stalinism, 274.

61 See, for example, GARF, f. 374, op. 28, d. 3061, 1. 16 (Rabkrin materials on vydvizhenie).

62 On cultural conflicts that resulted from the promotion of peasants into Narkomzem in the 1920s, see my unpublished paper given at the 1995 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, “Peasants into Bureaucrats? The Recruitment and Promotion of ‘Peasants from the Plow’ into Central Administration, 1921-1929.“

63 Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 30.

64 The extensive recruitment programs of 1929 resulted in only eighteen new peasants in the central offices. RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18,11. 5-9. There were only ten promotees in the oblast’ apparatus in 1929. Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 27.

65 See Orlovsky, Daniel T., “The Anti-Bureaucratic Campaigns of the 1920’s,” in Taranovski, Theodore, ed., Reform in Modern Russian History(Washington, D.C., 1995), 290–310;Google Scholaralso Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1:117-19; and Carr and Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 2:291-311.

66 Lewin, “Society, State and Ideology,” 209-40.

67 Rabkrin, Uchraspred, Orgotdel, and Orgraspred all berated the commissariat’s leadership about the deficiencies in personnel between 1921-1929. See Heinzen, “Politics,” chap. 5.

68 Merle Fainsod noted “the extreme weakness of the Party” in the Smolensk countryside. Fainsod, , Smolensk under Soviet Rule(New York, 1963), 44.Google Scholar

69 Spravochnik o spetsialistakh sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR(Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), 73. At the beginning of 1923, the Main Bureau of Technical Forces in the Commissariat of Labor undertook the re-registration of all agricultural specialists. For the first time the executive organs of the party and state as well as Narkomzem had at least a general picture of who worked in land administration.

70 Spravochnik o spetsialistakh, 73. A small number of these holdovers were peasants who had moved into the civil administration between 1905 and 1917.

71 RSFSR, zemledeliia, Narodnyi komissariat, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg. (Moscow, 1926), 577.Google Scholar

72 RGAE, f. 478, op. 3, d. 2979,1. 48 (Quarterly and monthly reports of provincial land departments).

73 Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 23, 26. These statisticians worried that the “mentalities” of two-thirds or even three-quarters of Narkomzem employees were formed before 1917. The age of state functionaries was indeed a common concern among inspectors.

74 This was the case despite a doubling of the employees who served in Narkomzem’s okrug and district bureaucracies between 1926 and 1928. Tsentral'noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie SSSR, Gosudarstvennyi apparat SSSR, 28. Within the entire Soviet state bureaucracy, only 9.4 percent of specialists at the okrug level were party members.

75 On friction between experts and party members in the industrial economy, see Bailes, Kendall, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941(Princeton, 1978).Google Scholar

76 Vsesoiuznaia kommunisticheskaia partiia, tsentral'nyi komitet, otdel, Statisticheskh, Kommunisty v sostave apparata gosuchrezhdenii i obshchestvennykh organizatsii: Itogi vsesoiuznoi partiinoi perepisi 1927 goda(Moscow, 1929), table 15.Google Scholar

77 Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1929, no. 38:18.

78 Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1929, no. 38:18-19.

79 For example, a number of Narkomzem officials were arrested in 1921 for encouraging the peasant uprisings centered in Tambov and known as the “Antonovshchina.“ RGAE, f. 478, op. 12. The Smolensk archive also records police concern about purported SR activities in the 1920s. Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 44.

80 Partiinyi arkhiv Penzenskoi oblasti (PAPO), f. 36, op. 1, d. 416,1. 79 (Protocols and materials of the Fourteenth Penza Provincial Party Conference, 1-4 October 1922). Support for the SRs had been strong in Penza during the civil war.

81 For the years through 1922, the reports are located in the Lenin fond (fond 2) of RTsKhlDNI.

82 PAPO, f. 36, op. 1, d. 1138, 1. 37 (Protocols of secret session of the biuro and secretariat of the Penza provincial committee of VKP[b], 1926).

83 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087, 1. 18.

84 By leadership cadres, Kubiak means the chiefs of the agricultural, land reorganization, veterinary, and forest sections within land departments. The 60 percent figure seems high, and Kubiak may have been motivated to exaggerate by the atmosphere at the end of the decade (which often targeted the Commissariat of Agriculture) or by other political reasons. In the same spirit, P. LezhnevFinkovskii, the head of Narkomzem’s section for agronomic assistance, noted at a 1929 conference that many unsuitable people were being sent to work in the land administration, including many who had been members of other parties. At the same meeting, a comrade Tutskii maintained that in the land bureaucracy a large percentage of employees were former SRs. Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1929, no. 38:18.

85 In 1924, Rabkrin criticized Narkomzem’s “completely unsystematic” procedures for hiring and checking backgrounds. This created a “favorable soil for the penetration of the apparatus by alien elements.” RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 1534, 1. 10. For a 1927 comment by the chief of Uchraspred’s Narkomzem office complaining that many applicants had already started work by the time he had finished his background check, see GARF, f. 374, op. 27, d. 702, 1. 55.

86 Ostovskii, E., “Pereproizvodstvo agrospetsialistov ili neratsional'noe ikh ispol'zovanie,” Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1927, no. 46:26–27.Google Scholar

87 To some local councilors, as Kimitaka Matsuzato has pointed out, the word agronomistwas synonymous with “anti-Christ, rebel and plotter.” Matsuzato, , “The Fate of Agronomists in Russia: Their Quantitative Dynamics from 1911 to 1916,” Russian Review 55, no. 2(April 1996): 182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

88 As Rowney points out, peasants found more opportunities for upward mobility in the civil administration than in the Communist Party. By 1929, only 13.7 percent of party members who held white-collar positions were peasants, while workers made up 43 percent. By contrast, peasants comprised 30 percent of all civilian officials in the commissarial bureaucracy, reaching 34 percent at local levels (oblast', okrug, and raion);workers held only about 19 percent of the positions. Sluzhashchie remained the single largest category. Rowney, Transition to Technocracy, 156-59.

89 On peasants in local administration, see Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, 119-26; Shanin, Awkward Class, 163-66.

90 RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 575.

91 RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR (XII Vserossiiskomu s“ezdu sovetov) za 1923-24 gg., 586.

92 RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 575 (based on information from 40 provinces). Of these peasants, 91 percent had some kind of obshchestvennyi stazh.

93 RGAE, f. 478, op. 1, d. 2087, 1. 17. RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25gg1., 581. A typographical error in the table lists “GZU” where it should read “UZU.“

94 See RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 581. Three-quarters of the peasant promotees for that period were not members of the party; 40 percent were listed as “poor peasants,“ and 60 percent as “middle peasants.” Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn', 1926, no. 5:31.

95 Bineman and Kheinman, Kadry gosudarstvennogo apparata, 24.

96 RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18, 1. 13.

97 RSFSR, Narodnyi komissariat zemledeliia, Otchet Narodnogo komissariata zemledeliia RSFSR za 1924-25 gg., 582.

98 Ibid., 580.

99 RGAE, f. 478, op. 3, d. 2979, 1. 8.

100 For details on the abysmal working conditions of provincial officials, see Heinzen, “Politics,” 203-21.

101 See, for example, RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18, 11. 10-16. Sel’sko-khoziaistvennaia zhizn1, 1929, no. 38:18.

102 Shestnadtsataia konferentsiia VKP(b), 445. The November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee echoed this sentiment specifically with regard to agricultural workers. RTsKMDNI, f. 17, op. 74, d. 18, 1. 2.